Each day more than 200,000 United States Postal Service (USPS) carriers deliver mail to approximately 100 million individual domestic addresses. Much of this mail is delivered via a park and loop method wherein the mail carrier drives to a location on his or her route, separates mail destined for a particular loop of addresses and walks the loop, delivering mail pieces to addresses on the loop. Other mail is delivered via the curbside method where the carrier drives his route, stopping to deliver mail pieces to individual addresses.
The mail delivered by the carriers typically comprises letters, flats (including enveloped and non-enveloped magazines) and parcels. As used herein “letter sized” or “letter” generally refers to envelopes, postcards and similar mail pieces having dimensions up to about 6″×11″. “Flats” as used herein generally refers to larger, flat mail pieces having dimensions larger than about 6″×11″ and having a thickness up to about 0.75″, and includes catalogues, magazines, larger envelopes and similar items.
Currently, the carrier normally assembles one or more stacks of letters, flats and parcels and places the individual mail pieces in delivery order or another appropriate sequence for efficient delivery. At each address the carrier riffles or thumbs the stack or stacks, finding the first and last letter addressed to the address selecting the items for that address. The mail carrier places these mail pieces into the postal patron's mailbox and repeats the operation for the next address. Sorting or riffling through the stack or stacks of mail is time consuming and inefficient. Consequently, any reduction in the amount of time required to separate the mail for delivery presents an opportunity for increased efficiency.
In Pippin et al. U.S. Patent Applications 20020031284, published Mar. 14, 2002, and 20040168993, published Sep. 2, 2004, a mail case system facilitates sequence-sorting various types of mail together into individual bags that each represent unique delivery points. The mail case uses multi-bag inserts so that the bags for several stops can be set up quickly for sorting. At the end of the sorting operation, the entire insert may be pulled down from the case as a single unit to maintain the established delivery point sequence. This eliminates the carrier's need to find separation points or to combine selections from multiple sequenced stacks of mail during the delivery operation.
Edmonds U.S. Patent Application 20030208298, Nov. 6, 2003 describes a sorting and packaging system comprises an induction and scanning system, a single pass sorting and packaging system for automatically sorting and packaging a plurality of mailpieces based on a single scan by the induction and sorting system, and a control unit connected to and controlling the induction and scanning system and the single pass sorting and packaging system. The single pass sorting and packaging system comprises at least one cell rack, at least one packaging system, and at least one delivery system. The package may comprise a bag removably surrounding the at least one mail piece addressed to a specific address.
The use of bags for packaging mail for delivery remains problematic in view of the potential cost of such bags, the difficulty of getting the mail into a bag, and the recycling problem presented by the large number of bags that would be required. The present invention addresses these difficulties.